Background Index

My Desktop Background Index is back up to date and now supports the newer 16x9 desktop files I'm uploading. Enjoy.

Beloit Mindset List

Beloit has posted their 2014 Mindset List, intended to categorize the differences between the mindset of the incoming freshmen class and their teachers. For the most part, this is always fascinating reading, in particular documenting the slow, inexorable change of life through the ages. The list is generally a smattering of cultural, historical, and other milestones that occurred before the current class was born. For example, from this years list, Number 32 is "Czechoslovakia has never existed."; mentioning this fact to an incoming freshman would probably be met with disinterest or rolled eyes, unless they have a particular interest in this part of Europe.

My personal favorites:

1. Few in the class know how to write in cursive.
Humorous to me because although I spent years learning cursive, all I can write in it is my name.

2. Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.
Also humorous to me since I send around 40-50 emails per day.

10. A quarter of the class has at least one immigrant parent, and the immigration debate is not a big priority…unless it involves “real” aliens from another planet.
I thought this was a huge priority for most people...? Also, given that almost everyone in the US is immigrant descended, I'm surprised this is new...

27. Computers have never lacked a CD-ROM disk drive.
Until netbooks. Expect this one to change again in the future.

28. They’ve never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day.
I thought I was the only one who didn't wear a wrist watch.

58. Beethoven has always been a dog.
A clear sign of the United States decaying cultural heritage. Or something.

71. The nation has never approved of the job Congress is doing.
Apparently times never change, no matter how much they seem to based on this list.

News Roundup -- I'm not dead yet

Hey, a news post. I haven't done one of these for a while.

• Giant Squid: Fear them, reprinted by Slate to honor the fact that U.S. scientists accidently caught a giant squid this week. A humorous look at the scariest creature to live beneath the waves.


• Incidentally, this article on a new rewrite of a Jane Austen classic (this time with giant crabs and man eating jellyfish!) is worth a read. These things seem to be all the rage, these days. Why is it that Jane Austen novels seem to perk right up with the addition of Vampires, Zombies, or similar monsters? We may never know.


• EEStor requests UL certification for their Ultracapacitor. This is big news. EEStor has been in the news for a while now, touting a truly monstrous capacitor that could, potentially, give cars 300 miles of driving. With a five minute charge time. And cheaper than batteries. When can I get one of these for my laptop? Check out Wikipedia for some (still unverified) details on EEStor's technology. Fascinating stuff.


• Ice near equator on Mars and, in the same week, water discovered on the moon. It's been a good week for dihydrogen monoxide discoveries in space. Unfortunately, the moon water is found in such small quantities that it could be from solar wind, which would imply that it's a fairly ephemeral substance on the moon. Mars ice is much more exciting -- and frustrating, since the ice was discovered near the area where Viking-2 landed. The Viking program results indicated that Mars was a dry, dead world, with no water -- how would our image of the planet be different if Viking had dug four inches deeper and encountered ice, thirty some years ago? Hard to say... But it would certainly have changed NASA's direction away from the gas giants towards the inner planets.

Cleaning House

So I decided to clean up a bit around here. New image for blogger -- at the top of Schmittenhohe in Austria, as opposed to the bottom of the Kilauea-Iki crater in Hawaii. It also appears that my lovely wife has simultaneously discovered blogging and Twitter, meaning that I need to start tweeting in order to keep ahead on the technical curve. My twitter is available here and also has a fresh image.

I would also like to draw attention to the "Cool Stuff from the Interweb" on the side (note: actual cool title forthcoming). This is a list of items I've shared from my Google Reader. I like this arrangement -- I can share cool stuff without having to comment on it. Enjoy.

Science News Roundup

Best of science news, straight to your RSS readers:

• A new algorithm for disc packing, which seems like a decent approach but also more than a bit heuristic. Without getting too derailed, I'm always amazed at how much theoretical computer science scoffs at the work necessary to solve real problems. This certainly seems more reasonable than strict, no-regret optimization.
• A new experiment finds that Dark Matter may be more complicated than previously thought. Pretty neat. Any article suggesting the existence of an as-yet-hypothetical "dark force" has to be an interesting read.
• Kepler launches successfully. I know lots of people were biting their nails about this one after the recent failure of the NASA OCO. Unfortunately, such failures are part of life with satellites. I'm glad to see that Kepler was successful and hopefully we'll see some excellent exoplanet data in the next couple years.

Snow in DC

So I woke up this morning to be greeted by this -- at least five inches of snow, probably more. Now I'm from Eastern Washington, so snow is something I'm used to. Since I moved to the east coast, however, I've developed a less-than-positive view of the stuff, largely because most people seem to turn into idiots when it's on the ground. It's going to be fun heading in to work today. Wish me luck.

News Roundup: 28 February, 2009

Fresh from the intertubes, via my Google Reader:

• John McCain still doesn't like science funding, which is one of many reasons why academics and scientists probably lean democratic. Science funding is, in my humble opinion, one of the best things that the U.S. Government does. Of course, our economy is in a crisis and maybe science shouldn't be the number-one priority, but marking all science funding as "pork" is ridiculously short sighted and stinks of partisan badgering more than anything. Personally, I think that the funding marked in the article is a great use of public funds, as astronomy suffers from a shortage of good observatory time. Of course, never mind that funding science with grants like this produces more graduate students, allowing the U.S. to continue attracting bright people from other countries to study here. Fortunately, Obama seems to get this; see here for details on the science component of the most recent budget.
• An article on how NPR deals with solar outages. One thing noticeably missing from the article (maybe it's in the video -- I couldn't watch it) is a description of other problems faced by GSO satellites. For example, at night, the satellites pass into the Earth's shadow. Since the satellites are solar powered, this is not a happy time for the satellites, and a good chunk of their weight is devoted to keeping them powered during this time. Also, the temperature difference between in-shadow and out-of-shadow is somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 degrees celsius, also unhappy for the circuitry on the satellite. Still, it's a good description of a problem I didn't even realize existed until I took up my current job.
• The Unofficial FAQ for the 21st Century, from the remarkably prescient and eloquent Charles Stross. Fascinating and a bit depressing, but probably right on the button. Anyone who hasn't read Stross's Halting State should do so immediately; his vision of cell-phone technology over the next twenty years is equally fascinating and, I hope, prescient.

Mumbai Attacks

In a change of pace from my typical bloggish ramblings, I'd just like to say that the attacks in Mumbai frighten me in a way that the 9/11 attacks never did. Part of that is because my wife was good friends with one of the people killed in the attack on the Cafe Leopold. Another part is just the different nature of the attacks. On 9/11, I watched (on TV) the second plane hit the towers, and even watched the towers fall. However, as indiscriminate and horrifying as those attacks were, the attacks in Mumbai were more akin to a full invasion by a small strike force. The invading army seized specific points of interest and held them as long as possible, in this case, for three days. This is a markedly different kind of attack from previous terror attacks (particularly in India) which were mostly bombings, including 9/11. I find it amazing that less than a hundred trained soldiers can take and hold what amounts to, essentially, an entire city for three days, even when fighting against the collective army and navy of one of the world's newest major players.

I suggest that my (precious few) readers please find a good charity to donate to. However, keep in mind that most of those affected by the attacks in Mumbai were the elite of India -- the business and political leaders -- as well as tourists. Not to belittle their tragedy, but the poor of India could use support as well. There are hundreds of charities operating in India, such as AID India, which could use your support as well.

Edit (30 Nov): Urmi asked me to point out that the person killed was engaged to her wingmate at school, who was one of the people interviewed in the Times of India article. Also, it appears that the entire attack was carried out by only ten people, which makes it all the more scary. I had originally thought it was closer to fifty.

Washington Post on Dick Cheney

After reading a rant about the merest chance of Sarah Palin becoming the vice president, I decided to read up on the changes that Cheney has wrought on the office. Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia is a bit vague and doesn't have enough detail. However, they do link to an absolutely fascinating series of articles by the Washington Post, available here. Amazing. I'll need to go back through these someday when I get the chance.

Long time, no blog

Wow, it's been nearly a month since I touched this thing. I'm not entirely sure where that month went, but here's a few things that I've been up to recently...

• My brother gave me a fancy new game for my birthday (back in early October...) called The Spirit Engine II. It's absolutely fantastic. The gameplay is a bit simplistic, but the story is phenomenal and reminds me why I tend to prefer indie games to most of the big names. I'm in only the fourth chapter, but I already can't wait to figure out what the heck is going on.


• The news with the economy sucks primarily because that's all I hear on the radio when I'm going to NC. Thankfully, I'm equipped with my mostly-obsolete iPod.


• The only thing that's keeping me sane with all the election news is the political satire at Sinfest, one of my favorite webcomics that is nowhere near as racy as the title implies. The sunday comics are particularly well done, such as this and this. There are plenty of other good comics in the archive, too.


• I appear to be on a fantasy novel kick. Forthcoming reviews will include The Lies of Locke Lamora and Red Seas under Red Skies, both by Scott Lynch, and Mistborn: The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson. I also read The Sunrise Lands by S.M. Stirling, but it may not have been exciting enough to warrent a blog post.

I'll try to be more on top of this whole 'blog' thing in the future. Look for more posts forthcoming.

News Roundup: Gustav Edition

It looks like Operation: Destroy New Orleans has a new chapter. The storm is currently (at least, as of this posting) over Cuba, at least a day from New Orleans. I guess that after the disastrous turn of events last time, the government of New Orleans isn't leaving anything to chance and is already evacuating the city. I'm not sure what to think about that. It takes quite a bit of certainty to evacuate a city when the storm is still over a day away, and still category three. It also shows that the government is pretty certain that the repairs made to the storm levees are insufficient to stop the storm surge. Additionally, the media is being strangely silent on what New Orleans is doing about its massive population of lower income residents, Are they fleeing as well? How? In any case, I'm not certain that New Orleans is handling this proto-crisis any better than they did the previous one.

In other news, the Republican convention is already being affected by the storm. I thought they were in Minneapolis already?

Obama's Acceptance Speech

I guess that Barack Obama has finally clinched the nomination, something which I believed had occurred about three months ago. His acceptance speech is a doozy, though. I didn't get to see it delivered -- not having TV sucks like that -- but reading it brought tears to my eyes. Here is a man who knows how to work a crowd. If he is even a tenth the leader that he is a public speaker, he will be a president for the ages.

Major highlights: Improved commitments to cleaner energy (including nuclear! No one cares about nuclear these days...), improved funding for basic research, tax breaks to small businesses, and a few more. These are the primary issues to me, so I'm glad that at least one of the candidates is addressing them directly. Bush's presidency has been an unmitigated disaster for the NSF and funding for basic research. If the US is to remain competitive in research, this situation will need to be fixed. If it can be.

News Roundup: Olympics Edition

• Beijing's Olympic Cleanup Sends Migrants and Homeless Packing
The news has been full of this stuff for the last year. "China planning cloud seeding to ensure sunny weather at the olympics." "Chinese restaurants pondering changing names to appeal to tourists." (Glad to see that one worked out well) "China lipsyncs during Olympic opening ceremony." These games have already been much more exciting than I really expected them to be. I love it -- based on the news, you might think that China's only pressing concern is patching up Beijing enough for the Olympics to finish, then sending things back to business as usual.
• The mystery of the black stuff on Kerri Walsh's shoulder
I'd seen this in several of the photos I've seen of the events. I haven't watched any of the games on TV, but it definitely looked weird in the photos. Along these lines, what's up with all the threads about the standard uniform for beach volleyball? I bet many other athletes also have similar medical equipment, but it's not as visible.
• Phelps easily wins 6th Olympic gold medal in pool
Not unexpected, but quite exciting to some people, I guess. For me the most interesting thing is the last line in the article: "It was the 21st world record set during the swimming competition." I heard about this on NPR during one of my numerous trips out to Gaithersberg. It appears that the athletes this year are wearing some sort of new high-tech swimsuit which greatly reduces their drag while swimming. The person on the radio went so far as to say that she expected almost all the records to be broken during this olympics -- the suits are that good. Which brings me to an interesting question: What's up with the Blade Runner? I remember that he was disqualified from the Olympics because apparently his lack of normal feet was considered an advantage. NASA designed swimsuits which greatly reduce drag in water? A-ok. Artificial feet which give a marginal improvement over the original equipment? Not so much. Nice double-standard, Olympics.

News Roundup - 2008.08.12

Some interesting news articles I've been following...

• AFP: Hackers hacked at infamous DefCon gathering
I'm not sure how much sense the article title makes, but it appears that some crackers at the annual Defcon gathering presented an interesting technique which would exploit the trust-based routing protocols used on the internet to create a mass-scale man-in-the-middle attack. I'm not sure how feasible this technique is. A computer employing it would be flooded would so much data that there would be little chance to filter it and do anything interesting. Besides, using this to gather information would be a little like trying to cook a steak to medium rare using an atomic bomb.
I've always wanted to go to Defcon and hear about all the cool stuff people come up with. Oh well, maybe some other time.

• Abhinav Bindra wins 10m air rifle gold
It appears that India has won its first individual gold medal at any Olympics, with Abhinav Bindra taking the gold in the 10m air rifle event. The last time India won a gold medal at the Olympics was in 1980 for Field Hockey. Interesting fact: I remember reading an article about Bindra from last year where he was complaining because the Indian government was refusing to buy him practice ammunition, citing the cost. I guess it turned out okay in the end.

• Russia and Georgia continue attacks--online
The physical battle appears to be more-or-less over, but the war continues in cyberspace, with Russian bot-nets attacking official Georgian websites. I find it fascinating that internet attacks are becoming more and more common alongside actual military maneuvers. Of course, some of this may be completely unofficial, but then, who can really say? I'm just glad things aren't turning out like in Charles Stross's Halting State.